_ _ _____ _ __ <*the* weekly high-tech sarcastic update for the uk>
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|_| \_| |_| |_|\_\|_| |_|\___/ \_/\_/ o http://www.ntk.net/ "We suddenly found that one of our home servers had been
turned into a repository for MP3s of the world's worst pop
music. All the guy's friends knew about it too, and they
downloaded several GB of files in the three days it was up"
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/01/10/ednote/ednote0110.asp
... have any of you non-Microsoft people ever heard of such a thing?
>> HARD NEWS <<
smoothed, criminal
MICHAEL JACKSON's new single seems likely to "Rock Your
World" in more ways than one, as promotional copies sent out
by Sony appear to be the first examples spotted "in the
wild" of audio CDs which won't play in PC CD-ROM drives.
"When loaded into the CD drive, the disc spun continuously
as though the drive was trying to access the TOC of a blank
or corrupted CDR", reports our correspondent, a producer and
sound engineer, adding: "None of our stand-alone
professional or domestic CD players had a problem with it".
Of course, this is exactly what Macrovision's SafeAudio (or
similar copy-protection systems) are intended to do: insert
"bad" error-correction codes, which audio CD players can
interpolate around, but higher-precision CD-ROM drives
don't, effectively preventing you from ripping (or listening
to) any tracks on your PC. The UK's Campaign for Digital
Rights (formerly the "Free Dmitry Sklyarov" guys) are still
planning a leafleting campaign alerting shoppers to this
ingenious reduction of their music's self-healing properties
(making CDs more susceptible to scratches or other damage) -
though perhaps an "explicit lyrics"-style labelling system
wouldn't go amiss either, for those of us who just don't own
a non-CD-ROM CD player.
http://uazu.net/cd/
- like anyone with a PC is still buying CDs anyway
http://www.bbspot.com/News/2001/08/encrypt.html
- apparently not as good as Jacko's earlier, audible work
We're all looking for safety in this insecure world: it just
happens that some of us aren't looking very hard. Ploughing
through the usual inbox of obscure and deliciously open
Webservers, we were very hard pushed this week to select the
most embarrassing lack of home security. Was it the
university clearing service UCAS, who popped onto their
public ftp server what appears to be a list of some three
hundred thousand students who accepted a place at Uni this
year (with their home addresses)? Or was it the folks at
FORESIGHT.CO.UK, whose staging server, while ingeniously
hidden under the http://stage.foresight.co.uk/ URL, still
remains publically accessible - avec private intranet - to
the rest of the world. Or maybe, just maybe, it was ACORN
USER, whose last CD included a free RISCOS Web Browser -
together with the magazine's own selection of personal
cookies, including AU reader Brian O'Carroll's Amazon
preferences, as well as site ids for voyeurgals.com,
amateurpie.com, and perhaps most scandalous of all for the
true believers, MSN?
ftp://ftp.ucas.ac.uk/pub/accept_home.csv
- gone now; don't do it again!
http://stage.foresight.co.uk/
- going down any second ... now
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=ant1423570b0r2wt%40194.72.192.6
- or British Telecom. British Telecom would be worse.
Answering our own question: no. By tradition, all system
weaknesses, no matter how entertaining, are always trumped
by use of the infamous ALL@DEMON.NET security hole, whereby
company-wide Demon resignation notices always seem to get
bounced to our tips address (what are we, Demon's secondary
MX?). Good to see the exploit is still open, even as
employees are *supposed* to use all@thus.net when firing off
their wide-ranging, self-destructive attacks. "all@thus.net
mailing list does not go to all staff. Hence the mail to
all[@demon.net]", writes the resignee, before settling in
for the argy-bargy. It's all here: the homely IRC
references, the sideswipes at the non-Net management, the
call to the pub, the delicious literary references. We
eagerly await the traditional Demon management response,
which, judging from last time, consists of a string of
abuse aimed at the ex-employee, followed by the swift exit
of the manager himself. Demon: however it may change, still
the bestest, most fun-packed of ISPs.
http://www.ntk.net/2001/09/21/goodbye.txt
- "Drink until dead."
http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?back=archive99/now0319.txt&line=55#l
- zey call it zee "Bliss effect"
>> ANTI-NEWS <<
berating the obvious
mysterious Glasgow-based letter-writer to LONDON METRO:
http://www.ntk.net/2001/09/21/dohmetro.jpg imitates San
Francisco-based SALON columnist of exactly the same name:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2001/09/14/afghanistan/ ...
RICHARD DAWKINS declares war on all religions everywhere,
offers personal arsenal of pigeon-guided cruise missiles:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4257777,00.html
... YAHOO search for hijackers' names "inconclusive", reports:
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,46991-2,00.html -
"Some names were close to those of the hijackers, while others
didn't match up at all"... striking family resemblance:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk_politics/newsid_1544000/1544871.stm
... SPACE.COM identifies another likely culprit - gravity:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/generalscience/wtc_science_010919.html
... godless "Other Realm" teen threatens further "zappings":
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0671027026.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg
... and, hopefully concluding our coverage for now, good to
see everyone mucking in: http://www.webgirlauction.com/ ...
lame "last page of net" gag: http://www.1112.net/lastpage.html
has two links leaving it... master of camouflage, Privet Ryan:
http://freewarepalm.com/hobbies/moviecritic.shtml ... hope
CHORUS have registered that popular www.PORTAL NAME.ie domain:
http://www.chorus.ie/broadband.html ... very trusting, these
small NZ communities: http://www.swktodc.govt.nz/Fix-o-gram.htm ...
>> EVENT QUEUE <<
goto's considered non-harmful
This year, some of the speculation on how to "save" UK games
trade show ECTS has dwelled on whether it should be open to
the public and thus become more of a LIVE 2001-style mass-
market exercise in soul-destroying corporate PR (from 10am
today, Friday 2001-09-21, Birmingham NEC, UKP12.50 on the
door). Sapping your will to live this year are opportunities
to "have your picture taken with a Sun Page 3 girl", "show off
your knowledge of the mobile communications industry" and to
"ooh" and "ahh" at the UK's debut unveiling of MICROSOFT
WINDOWS XP, which seems to be a long-overdue security patch
for the popular virus-propagating operating system. We kid you
not, last time we saw a MS product launch at one of these
events (admittedly quite a while ago), they were facepainting
the kids in the crowd with the "Windows" logo.
http://www.livexpo.co.uk/LIVEnews.asp?ID=47
- site requires Flash, for no immediately obvious reason
http://ecoplan.org/carfreeday/
- apparently Saturday is also "National Chocolate Day"
>> TRACKING <<
sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering
Hack, hack, hack. X-Windows 4.0's support for antialiasing
was a fine, timely hack by Keith Packard; rewriting
application widget libraries like Qt and GTK 2.0 to support
it are an ongoing piece of hackery in themselves; but in
terms of master-kludge, shaolin philosopher Josh Parson's
GDKXFT beats them all. It's a stomp-in replacement for the
GTK+ font functions that lets almost all Gnome apps
instantly fuzz over with antialiased fonts. Some fiddling is
required: in particular, you may have to stick in a
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/gdkxft.so before your set-up pays any
attention. Also it won't work with Mozilla or
gnome-terminal, can crash your X-server, won't work with
every font, and when you do get it working, you generally
can't tell the difference. Which teaches you an important
lesson: Apart from ruining GIFs in the GIMP, why did you
want AA in the first place? Oh, yeah: hack value.
http://philrsss.anu.edu.au/~josh/gdkxft/
- isn't easier to just take your glasses off?
>> MEMEPOOL <<
hasta la altavista
eyes of BUNGLE: http://www.widdy.demon.co.uk/rainbow/head.htm
... old man MOVIES: http://seanbaby.com/ifls/ ... it's lucky
we only run unconfirmable RADIO 1 ban lists, isn't it?
http://dotmusic.com/news/September2001/news21910.asp versus
http://www.snopes2.com/inboxer/hoaxes/radio.htm ... you know
when you've been playing first-person shooters too long:
http://personal.mco.bellsouth.net/mco/g/r/gregts/ ... and
you really know you've been watching too many ads when:
http://www.slipups.com/items/15971.html ... hey, what's wrong
with the timeless "don't try and ram the station, or vipers'll
get you" analogy? http://www.ibell.co.uk/vortex/castle/ ...
when retro and case-mods collide (the first, we bet, of many):
http://www.globalpublicationspress.com/retrocase/ ... the
irony being - it's not funny: http://www.opengiggle.org/ ...
it's the little samurai headband its wearing that worries us:
http://www.intercorr.com/roach.htm ... in 2001AD, THARG promised
all the city blocks would be named after present-day celebs:
http://www.jdi.ucl.ac.uk/ ... ugh! bugs! crawling over my - face!
http://chat.q42.net/?url=www.ntk.net (IE only) ... kill us both,
SPOCK: http://www.thebrainstrust.co.uk/article.17.2002.html ...
>> GEEK MEDIA <<
the less rude www.tvgohome.com TV>> in the future, all celebrities, world leaders and tech
standards will be selected via the tried-and-tested process of
auditioning idiotic hopefuls on TV, as seen this week in MODEL
BEHAVIOUR (6pm, Fri, C4) and BEST INVENTIONS (7.30pm, Wed,
BBC1)... the "mobile phone" edition of UNREPORTED WORLD
(7.30pm, Fri, C4) so far remains untransmitted due to extended
news coverage... LOS DOS BROS (10.40pm, Fri, C4) is a sketch
show with the blokes out of "Smack The Pony". Hello?... and
the BBC stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the rugged frontier
spirit in extended song-adaptation CONVOY (11.15pm, Fri, BBC1)
... Dani Behr - who you may have thought was dead - and Joe
Mace - who you may have hoped was - present grimly jovial
SM:TV knock-off THE SATURDAY SHOW (9am, Sat, BBC1)... scanners
indicate a small but significant risk of Kevin Warwick
punditry in AI tie-in THE ANDROID PROPHECY (11.50pm, Sat, C4),
handily followed by "Terminator" knock-off APEX (1am, Sat,
C4), and preceded by TOP TEN TV LOSERS (9.10pm, Sat, C4)...
up against arguably Jim Carrey's most satisfying film, LIAR
LIAR (9.15pm, Sat, ITV1), and combined Julianne "Hannibal"
Moore, Lori "VR5" Singer and Huey "Back To The Future" Lewis
nudity in comparatively watchable Altman portmanteau SHORT
CUTS (11.55pm, Sat, BBC2) ... Sherilyn Fenn's NIGHTMARE STREET
(11.15pm, Mon, BBC1) begins a week of former "Twin Peaks"
contributors failing to live up to their early promise - see
also Lara Flynn Boyle in THE TEMP (11.05pm, Tue, BBC1) and
David Lynch himself in LOST HIGHWAY (11.55pm, Tue, C5)... the
makers of "Robot Wars" adapt their seemingly evergreen teatime
format to paintball with X-FIRE (6pm, Tue, C4)... there's a
double-bill of computer-graphic enhanced profiles of dead
things - the Dodo in EXTINCT (9pm, Tue, C4), and racing driver
Ayrton Senna in GOING CRITICAL (9.30pm, Tue, C4)... and, while
the BBC pulled an unusually distressing CAPTAIN SCARLET this
week (6.20pm, Mon, BBC2), C5 happily showed "Terminator 2",
and show no sign of backing down from Spacey/Jackson face-off
THE NEGOTIATOR (9pm, Tue, C5)... IN BUSINESS (8.30pm, Thu,
Radio4) looks at the UK games biz... Nathan Barley art video
"OneDotZero" spinoff ONE DOT TV is back (1.10am, Thu, C4)...
and "Evil Dead" director Sam Raimi pops up in uninhibited
Jules Verne "adaptation" JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH
(3.35pm, Fri, C5)...
FILM>> it's the epically grim fairy-tale synthetic-emotion
lost-child special-effects extravaganza that Spielberg has
been trying to make all his life, but unfortunately that
doesn't make it any easier to enjoy science-free sci-fi AI
(http://www.capalert.com/capreports/artificialintelligence.htm :
a nude boy behind an iced glass shield, covering himself with
his hands; much talk about sex; sexual conquest; sexual
servicing, anatomy and use of robots for sex toys; telepathy;
equating sex with love; excessive cleavage before a child;
statue nudity, some quite vulgar)... following the hilariously
downbeat Startup.com, the other side of the dotcom dream is
explored when Wayne "Smoke" Wang and his DV cam imitate
http://www.bbspot.com/News/2000/9/linux_laid.html in grainy
arthouse nerdporn THE CENTER OF THE WORLD (http://www.cndb.com :
porn star Alisha Klass cameos as a stripper; [Molly Parker]
has cute small breasts; [Peter Sarsgarrd's] balls at least are
clearly visible in one shot when he bends down) - now *that's*
AI: http://www.center-of-the-world.com/chat/chat.html ... or
Kirsten Dunst comes of age in wrong-side-of-the-tracks teen
romance drama CRAZY/BEAUTIFUL (http://www.cndb.com/ : the
nudity was cut from the film. It was replaced with a scene
with [Dunst] wearing just underwear; a clear view of the
underside of her breast at least once)...
DRESS DOWN FRIDAY>> sorry, no new designs this month - we're
in the process of reworking the shop to accommodate everyone
who's asked for everything in girls' sizes, or XXL, or black,
or all three. Or shipped to the southern hemisphere, for that
matter: "You're right, it's getting a bit chilly here at the
tip of Africa - temperature's dropped to the mid-20s",
confirmed PAUL W from his .za domain, following NTK 2001-05-
18's jibe: "Isn't it winter over there?". "With the mercury
hitting a dizzy 10 degrees at Bristol airport a couple of days
ago," Paul adds, "I can appreciate your desire to hold on to
all the T-shirts you can". More specifically, if anyone wants
to buy any of the current range - "Encoded" now back in stock
in both Medium and XL, "Adminspotting" back in more sizes next
month - then do so at http://www.geekstyle.co.uk/ before the
start of October, when the "changes" will commence... many
would-be designers out there seemed to be actively encouraged
by the "increasing trends towards the upsetting and bizarre"
reported in NTK 2001-07-20, as ANDY PANDINI swept the board
for worst pun of the month with his firmly non-sexist "Knead
To Know" concept: http://www.pandini.co.uk/ntkfemale.jpg - or,
for men: http://www.pandini.co.uk/ntkmale.jpg . Most prolific
was TARAS YOUNG, who submitted no less than 6 different
designs - http://www.strugglers.net/~taras/images/shirt/ - of
which our favourites are probably "treeloot" and "rebelgoat",
though we're not sure if the digitised goat is a Jeff Minter
trademark, while THE TARTARUS COLLECTIVE explored similar
themes with their largely self-explanatory "Keep Mordor Tidy":
http://www.tartarus.org/~simon/things/kmt.png ... "Elite"
author IAN BELL and MATTHEW GARRETT both went amazingly self-
referential with http://www.ibell.co.uk/misc/tshirt/ntk404.htm
and http://zeus.jesus.cam.ac.uk/~mjg59/tshirt.html , and CHRIS
HEALEY apologised for his "non-existent Paintshop skills", but
explained that "anger got the better of me" and went ahead
with http://www.arco.ndirect.co.uk/images/tshirt.jpg anyway...
of course, if you can't design, you can just send in a slogan
- or, if you can't think of a slogan, you can redesign someone
else's (we'd still like a more "visual" interpretation of last
month's: http://www.tartarus.org/~simon/tshirt.png ). Topping
the text-only weirdness this time around was BODO MOELLER's
"Personally, I prefer T-shirts with nothing printed on them.
Consequently, I recently had myself made a couple of T-shirts
saying 'This shirt intentionally left blank'"; the suggestion
from JO3SH that we replace all the usual "Jesus [is Lord etc]"
bumper stickers with "Linus" instead ("Honk if you love Linus.
And so on"); and ALEX TEUGELS who, during the course of
discussing whether there was a "Police Aware" complement to
Toxico's "Police State" design, came up with the inspirational
"Talk to the router, 'coz the host ain't listenin'". As ever,
let us know if you could wear (or improve) any of the above,
and we *will* get round to printing more in the future, just
you see if we don't...
>> SMALL PRINT <<
Need to Know is a useful and interesting UK digest of things that
happened last week or might happen next week. You can read it
on Friday afternoon or print it out then take it home if you have
nothing better to do. It is compiled by NTK from stuff they get sent.
Registered at the Post Office as
"a breath of fresh air? Isn't that a little tasteless?"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4260488,00.html
NEED TO KNOW
THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK.
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